Now of course I know that today, August 24, is more correctly known as the Feast of St. Bartholomew. I went to mass this morning. I saw the priest in his red vestments. The liturgical color is red on apostle feast days, not to tell you anything you don’t already know, dear readers. (Indeed, one of my wonderful liturgy teachers used to preside in red on July 22, Mary Magdalen’s feast day. It was an aggressively inspired act. She is not of course formally recognized as an apostle. This is despite the fact that she was in fact the first apostle, strictly speaking, that she was “the apostle to the apostles” strictly speaking. She did not, however, make the “twelve” cut for the Church’s purposes. But I digress.)
Back to Nathanael! I like him. I think of him as a poet, dreamy, lost in revery. Nathanael is Bartholomew’s first name, his Hebrew name. Bartholomew is Greek. It means “son of” somebody, Tholmai, or something like that. Everybody had Greek and Hebrew names in those days if they were Jewish. It depended on what circles they moved in, which ones they’d use. Bartholomew is only called Nathanael in one of the Gospels (John: 1:45-51). But it’s probably what his friends called him most days. There is a most wonderful scene of him under a fig tree there.
But why do I bore you with these things in an ostensibly literary blog? Because. Nathanael looms large in one thing I write, a novel called Sheep. The story gravitates around a (completely fictional) chapel in which a huge stained glass window holds pride of place. It was created by John LaFarge, father of a well-known Jesuit, and rival of Tiffany in the 19th century American art world. The scene it depicts in deep Victorian style: Nathanael among green fig boughs, the rich leaves bending thickly around him, his face looking up, startled, as heavens open and the angels of God ascend and descend upon the son of man. (Cf. aforementioned John verse.)
I completely made the window up. But that’s what we do, yes? We are human beings. The narrative impulse defines us as a species. It is how we understand the world. Writers know this. They say it over and over again. A.S. Byatt and Penelope Fitzgerald spring first to my mind, but that’s because I love female British novelists. I bet even Elizabeth Bowen said it somewhere. And of course my beloved Marianne. (She even translated Leben Jesu into English from the German, you know. But I digress again.)
So to return to the title of this post, which should technically be my theme, not that there are express genre requirements for this blog stuff, but I was well-trained in literary form (Northrop Frye was the big guy when I was in school): The Feast of St. Nathanael. I will think of this as a more expansive sort of feast day than its more liturgically correct counterpart. Full of stories and wonder. Not the political nastiness of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre, that horrorific Catholic-Protestant blood lust in the streets of France a few hundred years ago. Not the Church’s rigid insistence on 12, when a more fluid 13 that incorporates a woman’s understanding might be more reflective of reality (not to mention more productive of parousia).
But my wonderful Nathanael. Whom, the story says, was seen under the fig tree. I think of him there singing songs to himself before Philip got ahold of him. Telling himself stories of angels.
Dawn Aberg 